About this blog

Drug testing is an ineffective, unreliable, and inexcusably invasive form of security theater forced on the American people based on deliberately skewed data, public ignorance, and moral panic, and it continues operating on those frauds to this day, mostly because those of us who are aware of the facts must live in fear of being targeted as addicts. This blog is intended to raise public awareness of the real facts about drug testing that the testing companies don't want you to know, and to provide some tools to the public by which they can raise awareness while maintaining anonymity. I will also be accepting guest posts, if anyone has a story about drug testing injustices they would like to get out anonymously, or if anyone just has something to say against drug testing in general.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Why has no one made this connection yet? (The REAL "gateway" involved in marijuana)

I just had a thought.

It's already been established time and time again that companies that drug test their employees have lower rates of productivity (unless you want to go by the biased Marlboro-style industry-funded research that always states that always conclude that drug testing is the best thing ever to happen to American business). The mechanism for this is usually worker morale, that employees who feel respected, valued and trusted by their employers do superior work to employees in companies where they are treated with contempt by the management (to the point of having no physical privacy rights, being openly called criminals and being forced to subject themselves to constant humiliating and invasive physical searches to "prove" their innocence only to have to prove it again the next day if the employer demands it.) I am not denying this either; the fact that employer respect correlates to worker morale correlates to higher productivity is also well-established, as is the fact that people perform poorly when subjected to constant surveillance.

But here's what I was thinking today.

It's been established (again, by all the non-biased research) that people who smoke marijuana tend to be more productive than people who do not. And now it's been established (again, by all non-biased research) that companies that drug test have fewer marijuana users but a hell of a lot more cocaine users. As my late brother once told me, he thought I was mad and that drug testing was an important part of ensuring workplace safety and productivity, right up until he started working at a warehouse with a robust "your piss and your body is company property subject to constant surveillance" policy and found himself for the first time constantly surrounded by glassy-eyed co-workers who were clearly in the grip of some hard drug like cocaine while working on the heavy machinery. Drug testing programs target marijuana primarily, as that is the only drug they have more than the most forlorn hope of ever catching, since the hard drugs clean out of the system within a day or two, metabolites and all, and so marijuana accounts for about 98% of all positive tests--which means if your company tests for four drugs and marijuana, a common policy layout, they will have to catch 200 drug users to net one positive for every non-marijuana drug, and the other 196 users will be marijuana users. Which means that catching hard drug users with suspicionless drug tests is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Which means both that marijuana users are increasingly being pushed into using harder drugs that are more difficult to catch AND that cocaine/heroine/hard drug users, including those who will come to work under the influence, have a better chance of getting hired to begin with and staying employed than people who smoke harmless marijuana responsibly off the clock no differently than someone having a cold beer at home.

So why has no one put these ideas together logically? Why has no one added this evidence of drug testing driving up hard drug usage rates as a possible reason that companies that do not drug test have higher productivity rates? Not to crowd out the psychological evidence that workers who feel respected, valued and trusted do better work and that that will have a significant effect on the productivity of a company, but it's becoming clear that drug testing programs are making hard drug users more employable than marijuana users and, in this way, prodding a lot of incredibly productive marijuana users into using harder drugs that are actually harmful and addictive.

Once again, any elements of marijauna that could make it a "gateway" to other more harmful drugs are a direct result of the failed Drug War and it's methods and have nothing to do with any inherent properties of this amazing plant. This, of course, has been observed, but for some reason the role of drug testing in this has been overlooked. The Drug War and its various dishonest profiteers, especially in the drug testing industry, have been responsible for creating the problem they pretend to be solving, and then sell us more fraudulent "solutions" that, far worse than mere ineffectual snake oil or placebo, actually make the problem much bigger.

Drug testing is the REAL "gateway drug". Legalize marijuana, eliminate the various failed Drug War techniques like drug testing, and see how much better things get. It will happen, and they know it, which is why we're seeing these tantrums. I look forward to pissing on the grave of the drug testing industry, an industry that it turns out is directly responsible for millions of harmless marijuana users becoming addicted to hard drugs and, in some cases, going to an early grave. I look forward to that industry meeting its end, and it will not be missed.